Related papers: Improved covering results for conjugacy classes of…

A recently fertile strand of research in Group Theory is developing non-abelian analogues of classical combinatorial results for arithmetic Cayley graphs, describing properties such as growth, expansion, mixing, diameter, etc. We consider…

Let $S_n$ denote the symmetric group on $n$ elements, and $\Sigma\subseteq S_{n}$ a symmetric subset of permutations. Aldous' spectral gap conjecture, proved by Caputo, Liggett and Richthammer [arXiv:0906.1238], states that if $\Sigma$ is a…

Finding upper bounds for character ratios is a fundamental problem in asymptotic group theory. Previous bounds in the symmetric group have led to remarkable applications in unexpected domains. The existing approaches predominantly relied on…

We prove sharp bounds on the virtual degrees introduced by Larsen and Shalev. This leads to improved bounds on characters of symmetric groups. We then sharpen bounds of Liebeck and Shalev concerning the Witten zeta function. Our main…

The normal covering number $\gamma(G)$ of a finite, non-cyclic group $G$ is the least number of proper subgroups such that each element of $G$ lies in some conjugate of one of these subgroups. We prove that there is a positive constant $c$…

We investigate subsets of the symmetric group with structure similar to that of a graph. The trees of these subsets correspond to minimal conjugate generating sets of the symmetric group. There are two main theorems in this paper. The first…

We extend to alternating groups $A_n$ several results about symmetric groups asserting that under various conditions on a conjugacy class, or more generally, a normal subset, $C$ of $S_n$, we have $C^2 \supseteq A_n\setminus\{1\}$

The hypercontractive inequality is a fundamental result in analysis, with many applications throughout discrete mathematics, theoretical computer science, combinatorics and more. So far, variants of this inequality have been proved mainly…

We prove an isoperimetric inequality for conjugation-invariant sets of size $k$ in $S_n$, showing that these necessarily have edge-boundary considerably larger than some other sets of size $k$ (provided $k$ is small). Specifically, let…

We develop a flexible technique to bound the characters of symmetric groups, via the Naruse hook length formula, the Larsen--Shalev character bounds, and appropriate diagram slicings. It allows us to prove a uniform exponential character…

We prove that the symmetric group $S_n$ has a unique minimal cover $\mathcal{M}$ by maximal nilpotent subgroups, and we obtain an explicit and easily computed formula for the order of $\mathcal{M}$. In addition, we prove that the order of…

We compute the homology of the matching complex $M(\Gamma)$, where $\Gamma$ is the complete hypergraph on $n\geq 2$ vertices, and analyse the $S_n$-representations carried by this homology. These results are achieved using standard…

We study closures of conjugacy classes in the symmetric matrices of the orthogonal group and we determine which one are normal varieties. In contrast to the result for the symplectic group where all classes have normal closure, there is…

Let $G$ be a regular graph of degree $d$ and let $A\subset V(G)$. Say that $A$ is $\eta$-closed if the average degree of the subgraph induced by $A$ is at least $\eta d$. This says that if we choose a random vertex $x\in A$ and a random…

We study topological properties of random closed curves on an orientable surface $S$ of negative Euler characteristic. Letting $\gamma_{n}$ denote the conjugacy class of the $n^{th}$ step of a simple random walk on the Cayley graph driven…

We study the number of $k$-element sets $A \subset \{1,\ldots,N\}$ with $|A + A| \leq K|A|$ for some (fixed) $K > 0$. Improving results of the first author and of Alon, Balogh, Samotij and the second author, we determine this number up to a…

In this paper, we prove that the symmetric group $\mathrm{S}_n$ has $2^{n^2/16+o(n^2)}$ subgroups, settling a conjecture of Pyber from 1993. We also derive asymptotically sharp upper and lower bounds on the number of subgroups of…

In this paper we investigate the minimum number of maximal subgroups H_i for i=1 ...k of the symmetric group S_n (or the alternating group A_n) such that each element in the group S_n (respectively A_n) lies in some conjugate of one of the…

Sidorenko's conjecture asserts that every bipartite graph $H$ has the property that, for any host graph $G$, the homomorphism density from $H$ to $G$ is asymptotically at least as large as in a quasirandom graph with the same edge density…

We introduce a method for analyzing the convex hull of a set in non-positively curved piecewise Euclidean polygonal complexes and we apply this method to prove that, with the usual action of Fm x Zn on the metric product of the Cayley graph…